by Jane Brown
Chekhov had decided upon Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in its 1916 translation by Constance Garnett for his first production, which, in Dorothy’s words, ‘In the winter of 1940 his students will take out to the cities and towns of the old country and to distant regions of the new [world].’ If things went according to plan, at the age of fifty-two, Dorothy would open on a Broadway stage in the substantial role of Varvara Stavrogin, a woman of ‘possessions’ of many kinds who shares a deep, platonic love with Stepan Verkhovensky, played by Chekhov. From her growing experience she continues to explain the training:
A method is unfolded, so precise that no vagueness is possible; so profound that only by continuous and gruelling effort can the student become aware and sensitive in his body and aflame in his imagination. Never is praise or blame given, but instead doors are opened, one by one, through which the creative power of the student may emerge. Watching [Chekhov] teaching one becomes aware of a new art of communication. Every word that he utters is spoken with his whole person; every movement he makes is rhythmical; no part of his being is inactive. In fact, through him activity seems to achieve a new dimension of intensity.269
Not everyone was convinced, Sean O’Casey for one. He felt that the theatre ‘must find itself again in literature’, and his wife Eileen wrote that ‘while appreciating that Michael Chekhov was a clever man, he could not endure a set-up in which the actors wore long blue robes and went round capering and bowing to each other’. She felt that Dorothy ‘was ignoring something splendidly worthwhile upon her own doorstep’.270
Or perhaps it was that O’Casey did not need rescuing? Rescuing émigrés was a dubious activity at this time with public fears that they would turn into collaborators when the invasion came. Dorothy was undeterred and to the Jooss dancers and Chekhov company she now added, in the first week of February 1938, the choreographer and ‘dance artist’ Rudolph Laban. Laban was almost sixty, his career had culminated in the spectacular dance presentations by schoolchildren and amateurs in the Eckert Open Air theatre that launched the cultural activities surrounding the Berlin Olympics (he had steadfastly refused to choreograph the Opening Ceremony in the Olympic Stadium). Alerted by Kurt Jooss, Dorothy had sponsored his escape; she was not too absorbed to appreciate this additional soulful genius, but the dancer Lisa Ullman took him under her wing, looked after him ‘and probably saved his life’.271
Dorothy was too absorbed in her classes, though, to go to America and support Michael in his interview with the First Lady, but Leonard was going on agricultural economics business and rather nobly offered himself for the White House. He was horribly embarrassed, he had cold feet, and felt ‘just a four flusher, putting one over, barging in on the White House [as] just an exercise for my sudden self-conceit’.272 Michael was given an unpaid position writing reports, and Dorothy wrote her thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt on 23rd February 1938.273 She did not hear, and neither did Eleanor Roosevelt, of Michael’s cloak-and-dagger last meeting with Anthony Blunt in a pub on the Great West Road, when Blunt had torn a small drawing in half, giving half to Michael saying that the other half would be produced by his contact in Washington. Michael said that he ‘lost’ his half.274
For the early weeks of 1938 Dorothy was rehearsing the Dostoevsky; ‘Mischa kept telling me to be more commanding’; later, ‘my voice was like a weak mouse’. But on 30th March she was on her own on the Cunard liner Queen Mary enduring an uncomfortable crossing, immediately met by Michael and Belinda ‘Bin’ Crompton, and soon seeing her own daughter ‘Biddy’ and also Beatrix Farrand. Unusually she kept her place card for dinner on Easter Sunday, 6th April, at the White House, with Michael. A fellow guest was the Secretary for Agriculture, Henry Wallace, who had been to Dartington for one of Leonard’s conferences on agricultural economics, had written for The New Republic and was now the rising hope of the Democrats. This was presumably Michael’s first meeting with Wallace, who became one of his heroes, and who was shortly to be appointed as Roosevelt’s running mate for the 1940 election. Dorothy, and the absent Leonard, won presidential approval for their work at Dartington, and Dorothy’s friendship with the First Lady was cemented in her willingness to support Mrs Roosevelt’s good causes. It seems unlikely that harsher subjects were discussed – America’s isolation or Chamberlain’s appeasement and that the president’s newly appointed ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, had reported that the British view ‘was that it was certainly not worth going to war over such matters as the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, or the persecution of the Jews’.275 Dorothy had added the Anschluss, the ‘union’ declared by Hitler’s troops marching into Austria, as one of her ‘fearful’ notes in her diary. Coming home on the German liner Bremen, holder of the Blue Riband and interesting for her catapult-launched aeroplane which speeded mail delivery, she wrote that the Atlantic was like a millpond.
She is soon at rehearsals: 13th June, ‘found difficulty with “Now I know you love me” – Mischa asked me to say it to him, quite simply and directly, and then it seemed to come more easily’. Gerald Heard had left for America and was settling in California so his letters now come to replace their conversations, but they overflow, like his talk, with classical allusions and biblical allegories and end in conveying little, except his real affection for her. There is a slim chance that he will lure her back to another God than Mischa Chekhov in time to come. Whitney and Daphne bring their daughter Camilla, Dorothy’s first grandchild; also Vita Sackville-West comes to lunch with her sister-in-law Gwen St Aubyn, and they walk around the garden. Otherwise it is classes, rehearsals and unavoidable duties until term ends, and Dorothy finds herself crossing the Atlantic for the second time this year, on the Britannic with Ruth, William, Dorcas and Eloise, but no Leonard, for summering at Woods Hole. Still on the Britannic Eloise goes down with mumps and as Dorothy stays with her in the ship’s hospital (which Eloise never forgets) when they reach their cottage she has it too, then so do William and Dorcas. The children are up and down but Dorothy is unwell for the rest of August, spending time writing in green ink in her green diamond patterned notebook: ‘Mischa says “find the creative idea in everything”. This morning I think I discovered the creative idea of a sailboat – working with natural force, accepting, using and welcoming the wind, and at the same time preventing chaos by the use of [wo]man’s intelligence and conscious control.’ And again:
Coming up from the beach a moment ago I became aware of two general types of plants – those with flat tops outspread, and those with pointed steeple forms – for one we have, as it were, the democratic idea, the whole flower reflects and receives the sun equally in all its parts – the other has lifted itself to a peak with a kind of aristocratic distinction!
They are all well enough to move to Old Westbury for Michael’s twenty-second birthday. He is still happy in the State Department, still rapturous over Belinda Crompton, and ready for marriage and more responsibility, and so he becomes president of the William Collins Whitney Foundation. Dorothy attends a New Republic conference in New York where she is plunged into politics. The paper had been basking in the successes of the New Deal and domesticity, ‘isolationism’ by more ordinary names, but now Bruce Bliven was smarting from a long-running argument with Walter Lippmann over the need to confront German aggression, Lippmann telling him, ‘I see no way of putting any stop to [Fascist] aggrandizement except by convincing them that at some point they will meet overwhelmingly superior force.’ Dorothy would have winced, though she had heard something of the sort from Vita Sackville-West, whose husband Harold Nicolson was in touch with Lippmann, who told him how ‘we [Americans] watch with a kind of dread what looks to us like the failure of Great Britain to arouse herself to the danger she is in’. Bliven denied that he was under pressure to shift his paper’s stance to warnings of Hitler’s evil intentions, but this he did so as to wake up some opinions at least. Dorothy must have swallowed hard as she realised that her pacifism was no longer enough.276
She went on to Washington t
o help with Michael’s house-hunting, then sailed for home on the SS Paris, ‘a delightful ship’. Now she watched the headlines, and by the time she reached Plymouth Prime Minister Chamberlain was on shuttle diplomacy to Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesberg, bargaining over Czechoslovakia. She went immediately to the Chalet where Mischa was, as she wanted to tell him that America was relaxing the strict immigration laws against Jews from Europe, but there would be quotas, and they would have to plan carefully. Anti-refugee feeling was rising in New York and she feared it would soon increase in England. She listened to Chamberlain’s broadcast, read the reports of the fiery debate in Parliament, and waited for the news from Munich, ‘Hitler promised peace if all he took was the Sudetenland’.
Dorothy had never expected that the Atlantic would loom so large. She realised that Beatrix Farrand would not come to Dartington again, the death of her aunt Edith Wharton in France in August 1937 had severed Beatrix’s links with Europe. ‘The very last of my family,’ she mourned, as she wrote to Dorothy of her ‘added glow of affection’ for them and for Dartington. She had given them so much, and besides the lovely Courtyard, the spring walks through flowering shrubs and Dorothy’s Sunny Border, she had left design and planting ideas for so many more garden schemes.277 She had been to Hillier’s Nursery in Hampshire and personally chosen the cedars now growing on the lawn, soon to become the grandest images of Dartington. She had bequeathed to Dorothy the role of guiding spirit to their garden, which proved an unexpected kind of satisfaction that was to give her strength to endure the bitter years to come.
She was not deluded by the public hysteria over Chamberlain’s return from Munich, and even before the November terrors of Kristallnacht Dorothy had decided what to do, as she explained:
Then when the Crisis came and the supply of students fell away and the Trustees decided there would be a better chance for Mr Chekhov in America, I realised then that I could never entirely dissociate myself from the group and that if Beatrice and Mr Chekhov needed me in the immediate future I should stand ready to serve them, provided no other interests were sacrificed.
The class that had worked so hard gave a farewell performance in the Barn Theatre in December, which included a scene from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in which Dorothy played the peasant widow Aase. Michael Young remembered how everyone was agog to see this – how ‘she was intensely concentrated on her part and full of feeling which was, however, more fully directed inwards than outwards. The wonder, to the audience, was that the shy Dorothy they knew (or rather did not know because she was so shy) could get up there with a white wig, a radiant face, a hank of wool – and perform at all’.278
Beatrice Straight had found a large house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where Chekhov planned to resume his classes in January 1939. He insisted that he needed Dorothy for her part in The Possessed which he wanted to stage the following autumn. Dorothy’s justification was: ‘Leonard has not only acquiesced, but urged me to go. There is one other reason for going – if I can be of any use to Mr Oppenheim’s students in the future, as a teacher of Miss Crowther’s method, my own knowledge and personal experience will be greatly enlarged by another six months with Mr Chekhov.’279
Leonard had set sail for India in mid-December so that Dorothy had Christmas at home with Whitney, Daphne and Camilla, and then went to the Chalet. From there on 3rd January she wrote a long letter to Anna Bogue, thanking her for her carefully chosen Christmas gifts for all the family, indulging in her appreciation of the moment, and her own present:
The writing case is, altogether, a work of genius. It is by my side at this very moment, and I carry it up and downstairs, and in and out of the house – in fact it is rather like Mary’s lamb! It is so complete that it carries all my essentials for work, and what is more, it is so convenient and handy to use that I can’t resist having it beside me at all hours of the day. I have placed the little memorandum cards where they belong, and my fountain pen and stamps are fitted in too – and it is all become both a toy and a tool for my constant use and enjoyment.
After the presents, the people: George Bennett is in good spirits and has plenty to keep him busy, but he is worrying about Willard’s drawings and sketches which have been returned from various galleries – will Miss Bogue have them put into portfolios and added to Willard’s things at Old Westbury? Finally, ‘I can sit back now and tell you how much I’ve enjoyed your many letters and reports – and the long summaries of our many “personal dependents”. You are the real benefactor and guardian of many, many people, dear Miss Bogue, and your advice and help is given with the right discrimination.’280
On 14th March 1939 she noted ‘Czechoslovakia ceases to exist’ and the following day Hitler entered Prague. On 30th March she sailed on the ‘delightful’ SS Paris again, in her cabin of grey rosewood, and was met by Michael and Beatrice on her arrival on 6th April. She is keen on helping a campaign to show British films to garner support in America and attends a White House reception for this before going to Ridgefield. Their William Collins Whitney Foundation has granted the Chekhov Studio $4,000 and things seem to be going well. On 21st April rehearsals resume and detain her until the end of June, with just a break for another trip to Washington on 6th June for a family gathering at the Natural History Museum where the Whitney Memorial Wing, endowed in Harry’s name, has an added collection of birds. Surprisingly Gertrude has acquired these from the very Victor Rothschild who was so much a part of Anthony Blunt’s circle at Cambridge, who is now Lord Rothschild and has inherited his grandmother’s Tring Park with all its natural history collections.281 Back at Ridgefield The Possessed rehearsals have gone through the fishing scene, the drawing-room scene, the nightmare scene – ‘My epic!’ – and on 10th July reach the ‘Painful Parting’, scene or reality? She leaves anyway the next day, her passage booked on the Holland America Line’s Statendam .
Mischa Chekhov has given her a copy of Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and her reading results in a lesson for herself, dated 13th July, in her Statendam notebook:
Let go: sit lightly – live fully in the moment neither in the past (with regret) nor in the future (with fear) but fill the present with intense awareness – then past and future fuse with the present, and the concentration of intense awareness brings all together into the Eternal moment – into Timelessness.282
Arriving on 20th July in Plymouth the evidence of ‘mobilisation’ takes her by surprise, the First Aid centres, the sandbags and air raid shelters, the taped-up windows and posters shouting about the blackout. After a week at home she has gathered up the four children and Miss Jefferies and they are all back on the Queen Mary and landed back in New York on 7th August. They will have their holiday on Raquette Lake as planned, Leonard joins them in mid-August, and they tell Ruth, William, Dorcas and Eloise that they are to stay in America, mostly at Old Westbury and go to schools in New York, living with Miss Jefferies with Michael and Beatrice at hand. Dorothy’s diary counts the days, Hitler’s demands, the French Prime Minister Daladier’s promise to Poland, then Hitler’s march into Poland on Michael’s twenty-third birthday, 1st September, the British ultimatum on the Sunday, which expires, so that ‘England Declares War’.
Michael and Belinda Crompton are safely and joyfully married at Nantucket, and Gertrude Whitney is at the wedding and suggests that Sonny Whitney’s new Pan American Dixie Clipper seaplane service might be their safest way home. Dorothy and Leonard take to the air, landing at Gander in Newfoundland before the long sea crossing to Foynes in the Shannon estuary, where they arrive on 18th September. With lunch at Adair – this is still travelling in leisurely style – they catch a train at Limerick for Dublin, the ferry and home.
William, Dorcas Edwards and Eloise Elmhirst at the Dartington summer house just before they left for America
At Dartington in that autumn of the ‘phoney war’ she had to do some explaining. When she had spoken after the Munich Crisis of being ‘ready to serve’ Mr Chekhov some had thought she was say
ing farewell. When she left at the end of March and had not returned after her usual month-long trip, others thought they had seen the last of her. Apart from her fleeting visit to pick up Nanny Jefferies and the children in late July, she had been missing for almost six months. When Leonard left in the holiday month of August they speculated that he had gone to bring her home, ‘like Orpheus bringing his Eurydice back’. Two brief additional entries in her Statendam notebook are clues to her struggle within herself: on 13th August before Leonard arrived she noted, ‘One unhappy day at Ridgefield due to egotistical sense of separateness.’ Could she just not quite give herself to her part? A fortnight earlier she, Beatrice and Michael had spent an evening with Gertrude, who had made a note of their ‘lovely voices’ all speaking of their artistic interests. In this family bonding, or re-bonding, of like minds did Dorothy shed her ‘Russian-ness’? Her notebook also confesses that she had ‘learned the beginnings of conquering fears – the fear of acting, the fear of flying, the fear of people’ and she had learned how to say ‘No’.283
She had come home that September to a Dartington where the peacetime brilliance still glowed, where the Courtyard resembled an Elizabethan playhouse or Renaissance piazza teeming with beautiful people of many nationalities. The grey stones of the buildings were the backdrop for the colourful dress, and undress, of the dancers, singers and actors, upwards of one hundred souls chattering and laughing. According to Michael Young, ‘Leonard swore that there were more beautiful women per square yard at Dartington than anywhere else in the world.’284 Occasionally, after Thomas had served dinner, Leonard would look across to Dorothy and ask, ‘Shall we go down?’, to which she might reply, ‘Mmm... mmn... n... yes, in a minute.’ The party in the Courtyard felt that half an hour with ‘the duke and duchess’ was a restraint, and they were glad when it was over. How little they knew. Although Leonard took it all in good part, the ‘duchess’ was most relieved as she climbed her stairs, for she had been shaking in her shoes.